I believe Mr Jones to have been shaken pretty badly over climategate (as well, he had a debilitating illness, unfortunately). He’s no denier, but he is no longer a Ben Santer or Michael Mann any more, either.

I saw this coming ten years ago, I just knew it. I still think the 1998 spike had something to do with asymmetrical North Hemisphere volcanism, but have never been able to prove it. The rest of it is just El Nino variance etc.

No warming for 15 years. Hence the alarmists’ decision to shift the panic from “global warming” to “climate change.” Climate change is a great all-inclusive bogeyman. As we’ve seen, virtually any severe weather anomaly or event can be blamed on “climate change.” The Warmists, of course, fail to mention that the earth’s climate has been changing for more than 4 billion years.

As the AGW theory collapses, the alarmists have become a very desperate bunch. The public views them and their scare stories with increasing suspicion. They’ve become the used-car salesmen of climate science.

We seem to have reached the point, where it is no longer necessary for the alarmists to prove that any weather events are caused by “climate change” or “climate chaos”, but it is for the sceptics to disprove that claim.
The term “climate change” is in such common usage that I think that the populace has been brainwashed into assuming it is real. I am sick of hearing people advocating a particular cause and adding the phrase “and with climate change, this is all going to be much worse”, or words to that effect, even on topics which have very little to do with the climate. Most of the time I think they really mean “bad weather”, but “climate change” has become the preferred term. Of course, they have never bothered to check the facts themselves. Most of them probably genuinely believe that global temperatures are much higher now than they were 10 years ago, and that all bad weather is caused by “climate change”, because that is what they have been told.
When I personally told some Friends of the Earth campaigners that temperatures hadn’t risen since 1998, (based on HadCRUT3), they refused to believe me.

So I guess if a simple chart showing temperature anomalies is too much for their sensibilities, getting them to consider that Plank’s Law has just been found to be violated by tiny aerosols is totally out of the question? :-)

Plank’s Law is a law I learned while working construction as a teen and involves falling planks during the removal of forms after pouring concrete decks. I’ve seen construction workers nearly killed and sent to the emergency room for violating Plank’s Law.

When I calculate the least squares linear trend of the last 16 years of HadCRUT3, ending in July 2012, I find a linear trend of 0.033 C/decade, with a 1-sigma uncertainty of 0.018 C/decade. That’s says it’s warmed with a statistical significance of 93.4%.

The lag-1 autocorrelation is likely to at least double the uncertainty above, which means it’s difficult to say *anything* that is statistically significant over a short time period like 16 years.

So, I find the lag-1 autocorrelation coefficient for 16 years is r1 = 0.743. That means the effective number of degrees of freedom is N_eff=28.3 — in effect, there are only 28 points in the time series, not 192 (=16*12). That increases the uncertainty by a factor of 2.68, making it 0.048 C/decade. Thus, to say something statistically significant at the canonical 95% confidence level requires a change of at least 1.95996 times this, or 0.095 C/decade. And this does not consider autocorrelation lags beyond 1.

You just can’t say much and be sure about it statistically over a short time period like 16 years.

Oops, I meant to say:
It seems to me that if there had been statistically significant warming over the last 16 years, you would be able to say so.
The fact that you can’t say so, must mean that there hasn’t been any.

This is such evidence, but not junk evidence. If you look at the statistics, 16-years is simply too short a time period to make statistically significant (95%) conclusions about an autocorrelated time series. That’s what the math says.

It isn’t that (some of them) don’t want to show “global warming” over the past 16 years, they just can’t.

Here in the US, we have NOAA emphasizing (perceived) changes in the continental US as implicit evidence of “global warming” – while failing to remind their readers that this applies to the US continent only.

This kind of manipulative reporting was carried out in Australia for some years. Carbon tax was instituted, now they are having the worst winter in some decades – and a very angry populace over being taken by their own Government.

AGW is just horse shit. All the yelling I have done over a dozen years probably has not influenced anyone with a per-conceived belief about it

So you think CO2 doesn’t absorb infrared radiation? That the PETM was a fictional event? That the greenhouse effect doesn’t exist? That the 0.8 C warming since the Industrial Revolution is due to a magic wand?

David wants to fight imaginary demons — or at least demons that are dumb enough for his mind to cope with. The issue among thoughtful sceptics is that the basic physics is OK. E.g., greenhouse effect. But the speculative physics of the “enhanced greenhouse effect” are probably largely nonsense. The entire scare that David has bought into is based on the claims surrounding the ‘enhanced greenhouse effect’. If he was not so disingenuous, he would address the issues of contention, not keep switching the pea under the thimble.

There is no “greenhouse” effect at all, it is a fiction, it is something that you believe in because other people do, and it is fiction because there is no consistent way to define it, and I can prove this to you no matter how hard you try.

Wives tales die hard when there are some “equations” apparently backing it up, and without people demonstrating the fallacy behind it.

“And if surface warming is only an artifact of biased data, why are glaciers melting all over the world, sea ice volume decreasing sharply, and the ocean rising?”

Yeah……. it’s pretty dumb stuff isn’t it? Ocean been rising for thousands of years. Glaciers have been growing and melting, but mainly melting for thousands of years, sea ice volume has been going up and down… According to IPCC AR4, CO2 “explains” these changes, at best, since 1950…

Brian, I despise ideologies in general because they can make the smartest people switch their brains off… However, I’m not one to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

If there is a Hell and David gets sent to it for his zealotry, I imagine a place similar to Jean-Paul Sartre’ In Camera. He is locked in a room forever arguing that the world is doomed any day now, but squared off again three Brians who keep insisting the greenhouse effect is not real. :-)

I have to go with the academic literature here. I.e., the cost/benefit analysis done by economists combined with empirical data on what’s happened to the world over the last 150 years which has already warmed by over 1C. All good so far.. ;-)

Nobody can seriously waste time because you are fretting over a non-evidence based neurosis… It would be more helpful to worry about real and actual problems in the world, not ones largely a product of your imagination or some idealogical position.

“there is no hell, or heaven, or any of those childish fantasies. But your belief in it is very revealing….”

I am agnostic on claims for which there is no evidence positive or negative. Although I have mixed feelings over someone who swaps religion for ideology and thinks he is a superior type because of it. ;-)

“Really, “ALL” good?? Let’s see the citations of the papers and reports that show this…. ”

You sound totally ignorant of the literature–as if you get all your info from blogs or something. ;-)

Tell you what, name for me two or three academics who specialise in this field. If you don’t know anyone… ask or google around. Once you know *something* about the topic, then you can cite your ‘experts’ (maybe the Stern Review?) and I’ll cite ‘my’ experts and we can have a little citation war. ;-)

Yes Will, I know you think you have me all pegged as a Marxist or worse, but that’s just a convenient crutch for you. You don’t have the slightest fucking idea what my political views are, or how I view the world based on my experiences, versus my views of the science.

Next time, try analyzing the science instead of trying to peg people’s ideology as if you’re still a college student.

Steve, let’s face it — you are not a deep thinker. You know it and I know it. Your strength is throwing up two dozen half-baked graphs and newspaper clippings a day, and snap judgements based on black-and-white thinking. This is what gets you your traffic.

Stick to where you excel, and leave the math and deep thinking to others.

“Yes Will, I know you think you have me all pegged as a Marxist or worse, but that’s just a convenient crutch for you.”

I don’t make any judgements on your political or religious convictions, nor do I particularly care. I can only comment on the quality of your writing and the reasoning you use within. Your logic is abysmal and I speculate it’s due to idealogical conviction. Note, I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt that you are not actually a stupid person based on your qualifications, etc.

David, the same thing you feel toward me, as evidenced by your repetitive spamming, is the same way I feel about you and your ilk, and you can stamp your feet and yell and that won’t make your “science” one bit less shitty than it is.

Still completely misses the argument with a nonsense reply. If you don’t reply maybe people assume you are too busy or can’t be bothered… But if your reply is an obvious misdirection… what does that achieve other than make you look foolish?

Climate scientists dispute the warming has stopped meme on the grounds that other than 1998 the other years of the 1990s into 2000 were all substantially colder. So the 2000s ended up warmer because while the high temperature is about the same, this temperature was reached more often, while the 1990s had one big year. So 2001 as warmer than 1991, 2002 was warmer than 1992, etc. In Gistemp, even the 1998 record has been broken a few times.

Only an idiot could write the above surely? The issue is not whether there has or has not been a trivial amount of measurable heat gain over the last 10-15 years. The central issue is what the climate models have predicted should have happened and what didn’t happen. Climate “forcings” are at “record” levels and there have been no major volcanic eruptions to suppress temperatures as they did in previous decades. This requires explanation, not excuses that make no sense and completely miss the point.

IPCC 4AR WG1 FAQ 8.1:
“Nevertheless, models still show significant errors. Although these are generally greater at smaller scales, important large-scale problems also remain. For example, deficiencies remain in the simulation of tropical precipitation, the El Niño- Southern Oscillation and the Madden-Julian Oscillation (an observed variation in tropical winds and rainfall with a time scale of 30 to 90 days). The ultimate source of most such errors is that many important small-scale processes cannot be represented explicitly in models, and so must be included in approximate form as they interact with larger-scale features. This is partly due to limitations in computing power, but also results from limitations in scientific understanding or in the availability of detailed observations of some physical processes.”http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-8-1.html

David, that’s not how science works. You make predictions. You test them. They succeed or fail. In your case, what you believe in has largely failed. You can think up explanations for your failures after the fact, by creating additional speculative assumptions, such as what Foster Rahmstorf have done. (Well known speculative ‘catastrophists’ that are hard to take seriously.)

You can even try to blame it on ENSO, but there is no long term ENSO trend, and if you look at 30 years of data your predictions still fail. The entire SAT record shows expected warming of around 1.3C by the end of the century if the trend was linear, which would turn into a net benefit to the planet. And the later third of that record shows deceleration of warming, the exact opposite of what you believed was going to happen.